In a recent interview with Andrew Marr for LBC, former home secretary and incumbent chair of The Leaders Council of Great Britain & Northern Ireland, Lord Blunkett, spoke about how the Labour party was changing under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership, and highlighted the need for a long-term plan for skills.
Addressing the state of his party, Lord Blunkett said that Sir Keir Starmer had already “changed” Labour from the era of Jeremy Corbyn but refuted the idea that it was reverting to the “New Labour” that was seen under Tony Blair’s leadership.
Lord Blunkett’s comments came after Sir Keir delivered what the former referred to as a “speech to the business community” at the CBI conference.
At the time of writing, Sir Keir has made his latest political pitch to business leaders in Canary Wharf, promoting the party’s pro-business credentials at Labour’s 2022 Business Conference.
But Lord Blunkett distanced the party from suggestions that it was going back to New Labour in moving away from Corbynite policies and becoming more pro-business. Instead, he suggested that Sir Keir was simply learning from “what didn’t work going into the 2010 general election” and using that knowledge to move Labour forward.
The former home secretary also highlighted to Marr that New Labour was not fit for the challenges of today and a fresh approach was needed.
He said: “We did some fantastic things that need to be dusted down and refined for an era that’s twelve, thirteen years on from the defeat in 2010. I don’t want us to be New Labour. New Labour was appropriate for 25 years ago.
“I want us to be Labour party for the 2020s and 2030s - and that does mean looking ahead. It does mean putting a lot of meat on the bones of policies that are starting to emerge.”
Lord Blunkett said that Labour was “serious about government” again under Sir Keir’s leadership, and that its future policies “will be designed to deal with the catastrophe that we’ll face in two years’ time” when the next election comes around.
Lord Blunkett, who also spent time as secretary of state for education under Blair’s premiership, said that Labour had also learnt from its mistakes on the economy and the need for skills in the British workforce.
“I’ve learnt. I think the party’s learnt. And I think we as a nation have learnt, that we’ve really got to do something about the immediate skills needs, but also the medium and long-term.
“We got into the belief that we could have high growth, low unemployment, low inflation, low interest rates by bringing people in (immigration) instead of a long-term plan to get people skilled.
“It worked in terms of the economy, but it didn’t work in terms of the politics.”
Talking-up the need to upskill the domestic workforce to deal with the labour shortage in key UK sectors, an issue which he separately addresses in The Leaders Council’s special report on the Skills & Post-16 Education Act, Lord Blunkett talked up the importance of a “long-term plan” for skills in the here and now.
He also labelled the Tory government’s Autumn Statement “tragic”, pointing out that chancellor Jeremy Hunt had not invested “a penny more” into skills.
On immigration, The Leaders Council chair said that while there was room for it to plug the skills gap in the short-term, it was imperative that the government looked at the “right” sort of migration.
Indeed, this was a point made at the CBI conference by Sir Keir, who said that the British era of reliance on “cheap labour” from overseas had to end now that Brexit had taken effect.
Lord Blunkett said: “I think the right migration, economic migration for the right purposes is very sensible. We were moving towards that years ago, we’ve had it reversed - partly because of Ukraine, because that was unavoidable, partly because of Hong Kong, that was a choice.”
